


427. among strangers

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [288]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 17:42:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10621896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Sarah, Helena, the city, a cone full of something suspicious and deep-fried.





	

The city at night: the warm murmur of people moving through the streets, speaking in languages Sarah doesn’t know. It’s too bright here; she can’t see the moon or stars at all. Helena is off buying something fried and full of tentacles from a guy manning a suspicious-looking cart on the edge of the road, and Sarah shoves her hands in her pockets and waits. She would be worried, but at no point on this impromptu abroad trip has Helena _once_ gotten food poisoning from all the shit she’s eaten. So Sarah isn’t worried, just sort of bemused.

“Sarah,” Helena says, appearing at her side again. “Sarah. This is my favorite.”

“They’re all your favorite, meathead,” Sarah says. She starts walking; Helena walks alongside, keeping pace but somehow putting three times the amount of motion into it.

“Yes!” Helena says. “But no, because this is my very favorite.”

“What is it.”

Helena shrugs. “This I do not know.” She offers the grease-stained cone in Sarah’s direction and Sarah shoves it back out of her face.

“No thanks,” she says. “Haven’t got your iron gut, have I?”

“How will you get this,” Helena says, “if you never try new things, Sarah?”

“Guess I won’t get it, yeah?”

Helena shoves a bouquet of deep-fried tentacles in her mouth and crunches, somehow making the gesture contrary. There aren’t many people out – surprising, in a city like this. Back home—

(home)

(weird, isn’t it, that word: _home_ )

—it feels more crowded than this. Here: cobblestones, occasional stragglers staring unashamedly at Sarah and Helena’s face before moving on. Here they’re just twins, stupid twins who don’t speak the language, and that’s all they are.

“Hey,” Sarah says.

Helena makes a questioning sound through whatever she’s crunching on.

“Glad you’re here.”

Helena swallows everything down in one enormous gulp and makes a pained face as some fragment of shell or bone or deep-fried crust stabs at the inside of her throat. “I am glad also, _sestra_ ,” she says. “Thank you. For coming with me.”

(Helena on the front porch, shifting nervously from foot to foot. _I want to go_ , she says. _Not alone, but someplace nobody knows me. I don’t know where to go._

_Please come with me_ , that’s what she doesn’t say. But Sarah hears it anyways.)

“Yeah, you’re lucky I came,” Sarah says easily. “Without me you’d be lost in the first city you came to, yeah?”

“I am very good at directions,” Helena says, like a liar.

“Sure, meathead,” Sarah says. She bumps her shoulder against Helena’s. “Haven’t gotten us lost once.”

“ _Only_ once.”

“Sure, who’s counting.” (Sarah is, and it was not only once.)

Helena is too busy shoving her face into the cardboard cone to answer; when her head emerges it’s smeared with grease and dotted with salt and she looks immensely satisfied. She belches.

“ _Gross_ ,” Sarah says.

“You are gross,” Helena says, immediate response. “Much gross. Most gross.”

A few women walk by, take note of the two of them, keep walking. Sarah watches them go until they stop looking; then she goes back to watching the road ahead of them.

“I have never had this before,” Helena says. “Walking with one of my _sestra_ s. Having people know. When they see. That we are family.”

Guilty secret: sometimes Sarah imagines a world where they don’t have to hide, where the four of them can get brunch at some place that serves food late enough in the morning for Cosima to arrive, serves orange juice in champagne glasses for Alison, has enough pastries to satisfy Helena. All of them walking down the street together. This is something, though; this matters. She hasn’t had it either, much.

“It’s good, innit,” Sarah says, voice coming out softer than she’d meant it to.

“Yes,” Helena says, and she smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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